personal

That time again, when we enter a new year and some of us do new year’s resolutions. Mostly by recycling the ones we had the previous year and the year before that and so on and so forth. And trust me when I say that I speak from experience. There are things that I wanted […]

From time to time I post articles & reviews about products, services and events I like or support. This is one of those times, when I’m going to talk about two events scheduled to take place later this year: PoolPlay Summer Academy While not directed strictly to developers but to creatives from different industries – […]

Also talked about by Dan Pink at TED. I think this is one of the main reasons why open source projects work the way they do. A whopping 99.9% of all the software engineers I know think that they could do a much better job if they would have more autonomy. And most software we see are buggy, unusable, over-time and over-budget. I wonder why…

If you’re into management, I think you should have a good look at these video. I know a lot of people that desperately need this kind of knowledge…

PS: holding a gun to somebody’s head also works as a great motivator, as proven by the Spanish government earlier this month, when it used the military to “incentivise” the air traffic controllers to go back to work :))

After attending the PHP GeekMeet in Cluj, I’ve talked briefly with Andrei Gheorghe and remembered a presentation that he held some time ago at Wurbe, about Microformats. Well, what can I say? Microformats are cool idea, that will allow scripts to better retrieve the information from the Internet. Of course, if people actually use them. […]

…and it made me think a lot about my life and my career. Most of the technologies I’ve studied in a classroom are now obsolete. Or were already obsolete at the time I was studing them. It’s very morale damaging knowing that you’re studing something just to pass an exam and that you’ll never use that knowledge ever again. But I wasn’t discouraged by the educational system and I’ve spent a lot reading and experimenting on my own and that’s how I’ve got a pretty good programmer. Really! I was always appreciated by my work colleagues and considered to be the guy that they could always ask for help. But still, I can’t even write a louzy string comparison in ASM without using Google. That’s not because I didn’t want to learn that or that I consider ASM knowledge to be useless and obsolete like other people do, but because there is simply to much information out there and not enough time to learn it all. And it multiplies at an ever increasing rate. Ajax as we know it – with the XMLHttpRequest object – was coined in 2005, less than 4 years ago. Now it’s impossible to find a job description in the web programming field that doesn’t include Ajax. Today’s experiments will be next year’s job requirements. Our generation will always have to adapt to world that’s changing like never before.

So I’ve decided to expand my education and skills and I’ve made a list with things I want to do this year:

improve my knowledge of the Zend Framework – the target is to pass the Zend Framework Certified Engineer exam

improve my knowledge of the Linux operating system – the target is to pass the Comptia Linux+ exam

improve my command of the English language – the target is to pass pass the Cambridge exam

learn a little bit of German – no ambitious target here as I can’t really set a target, now that my level in German is below zero

get my bachelor degree – after all these long years, it’s about time

take a race driver course – a hobby for now, but one can never know what the future holds;)

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to complete the list, but I’ll try hard and I’m going to look back to this post on the 31 of December and see how much I’ve accomplished. And of course, start a new list with “to-learn”s for 2010.